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Air Doll
(2009)
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Gayle Sequeira
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Air Doll, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda and based on the manga Kuuki Ningyo, captures the loneliness of city life, in which dinners for one are routine and employees are replaceable.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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Lars and the Real Girl
(2007)
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Gayle Sequeira
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Lars and the Real Girl is a tragicomic examination of male loneliness.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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Toy Story
(1995)
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Gayle Sequeira
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Children must eventually outgrow their toys and it’s this existential fear that informs the animated film. Even as its characters worry about getting left behind, the movie is a perfectly preserved snapshot of childhood, a time gone by.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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Pin
(1988)
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Gayle Sequeira
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This Sandor Stern horror film begins by examining the dysfunction of the nuclear family unit, gradually morphing into the unnerving story of not just the things we’d sacrifice for family, but the things we’d sacrifice family for.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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Child's Play
(1988)
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Gayle Sequeira
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There’s not much subtlety to a slasher film in which the opening stretch sees a dying serial killer transfer his spirit into a doll, but snuck into Child’s Play is an effective commentary on capitalism and consumer excess.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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Suddenly in the Dark
(1981)
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Gayle Sequeira
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This absorbing Korean thriller adopts a kaleidoscopic effect when a wife sees, or imagines seeing, her husband and housemaid intertwined, representing the distortion of her perception.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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Magic
(1978)
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Gayle Sequeira
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This Richard Attenborough film is less scary than it is sad, about a mentally ill man wrestling with his inner demons and finding them no easier to control when they’re in tangible form.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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The Doll
(1962)
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Gayle Sequeira
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Director Arne Mattsson adopts an empathetic view of mental illness in a society utterly ill-equipped to handle it.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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The Doll
(1919)
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Gayle Sequeira
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The childlike framing complements the protagonist’s eschewing of adult responsibilities.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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3/5
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Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything
(2023)
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Steph Green
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But for all its beauty and sexual slipperiness, the film trips itself up with juvenile plot developments ripped from a romance paperback.
Posted Feb 22, 2023
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Alien 3
(1992)
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Anton Bitel
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the finished film – David Fincher’s (now disowned) feature debut – was set in an all-male prison planet, where lone woman Ripley becomes a martyr/mater to stop multinational exploitation.
Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Dune
(1984)
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Anton Bitel
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if this grand folly takes the sci-fi epic for a surreal spin, it remains anchored in ancient myth (note the hero’s surname) and in contemporary tensions of an ecological and geopolitical nature.
Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
(1977)
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Anton Bitel
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Part of its appeal is as a boy’s own adventure set against a vast, dangerous cosmos – but the characters’ resistance to tyranny also accommodates much grounded critique of 20th-century US imperialism.
Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Dark Star
(1974)
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Anton Bitel
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student film plays like a slacker satire of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), exposing all the ennui and idiocy of deep-space travel.
Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Solaris
(1972)
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Anton Bitel
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a peculiarly cerebral and poetic trip into both deep space and the mysteries of the human mind.
Posted Dec 16, 2022
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The Demon Planet
(1965)
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Anton Bitel
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the alien monstrousness on (and off) this planet, though labelled vampirism in the title, is of a decidedly geopolitical variety.
Posted Dec 16, 2022
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The Origin
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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If the film is full of the woodlands, caves and shadows that form our species’ primal fears, it is also, like Quest for Fire and Prey, literally primitive in its settings, delivering ur-horror that is the template (and origin) of a future genre.
Posted Dec 04, 2022
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4/5
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Other People's Children
(2022)
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Steph Green
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Rather than generalising about childless women, this is a sensitively felt and deceptively nuanced exploration of one woman’s experience with motherhood.
Posted Nov 30, 2022
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Dead Alive
(1992)
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Anton Bitel
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Peter Jackson’s hilarious Oedipal apocalypse vies as one of the goriest films of all time.
Posted Oct 22, 2022
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City of the Walking Dead
(1980)
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Anton Bitel
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[the zombies] also appear in dreams and in one character’s sculptures, as though a monstrous expression of broader nuclear anxieties in the collective unconscious.
Posted Oct 22, 2022
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I Walked With a Zombie
(1943)
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Anton Bitel
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Jacques Tourneur’s gothic romance (produced by Val Lewton) is shadowy and poetic, haunted by the abstract evil of historic slavery... This is where the cinematic zombie becomes an allegorical figure.
Posted Oct 22, 2022
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White Zombie
(1932)
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Anton Bitel
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Victor Halperin’s melodramatic feature introduces the zombie to cinema, with Bela Lugosi hamming it up as sinister mesmerist and vodou practitioner ‘Murder’ Legendre
Posted Oct 22, 2022
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Linoleum
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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this is full of intricacy, empathy and awe, not only locating the extraordinary in ordinary lives, but also bringing to its many conundrums a deeply affecting resolution that is as complicated or as simple as you choose to see it.
Posted Oct 10, 2022
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Attachment
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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For all the kabbalistic rituals, at heart this is a story of mothers and daughters, and a queer romance of otherness.
Posted Oct 10, 2022
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You Won't Be Alone
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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the shape-shifting Nevena embodies the contradictions in our capacity for vindictive monstrousness offset by immense, overwhelming love – and so writer-director Goran Stolevski’s strange, often brutal feature is also a hopeful lesson in humanism.
Posted Oct 10, 2022
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The Leech
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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the parasitic relationship that forms between priest and his profane houseguests proves bi-directional, as they share food, drink, drugs and beds together, and as David at last has a captive congregation for his endless, increasingly deranged sermons.
Posted Aug 23, 2022
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Sisters of Satan
(1977)
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Anton Bitel
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Offers up parallel interpretative matrices -- medical, psychological, religious -- in an attempt to rationalise the irrational, while satanically inverting the iconography of Catholicism.
Posted Apr 14, 2022
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Nude Nuns With Big Guns
(2010)
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Anton Bitel
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The ensuing parade of breast and penis, rape and murder, is somehow rendered even more tawdry by all the nodding, winking postmodern irony.
Posted Apr 14, 2022
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Dark Habits
(1984)
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Anton Bitel
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an ancient church seeking its place in a modern Spain.
Posted Apr 14, 2022
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Killer Nun
(1978)
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Anton Bitel
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Despite featuring nuns galore, wild confessions, lesbianism and other markers of the subgenre, this plays out equally as a giallo, its plot propelled as much by confounded identity and whodunnit mystery as by Catholic hang-ups.
Posted Apr 14, 2022
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Behind Convent Walls
(1978)
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Anton Bitel
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the question is raised whether all this debauchery, far from being sin, might represent a bubble of liberty in a repressive world.
Posted Apr 14, 2022
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Fabian: Going to the Dogs
(2021)
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Jordan Cronk
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Known primarily as a genre director, Graf applies his flair for dynamic storytelling and dazzling set pieces to Kästner’s uniquely autobiographical, character-driven novel.
Posted Feb 11, 2022
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Juju Stories
(2021)
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Anton Bitel
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Known collectively as Surreal16, Nigerian writer-directors Michael Omonua, Abba Makama and C.J. 'Fiery' Obasi each contribute an episode to this tripartite, Lagos-set anthology of traditional sorcery in modern times.
Posted Jan 21, 2022
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Hellions
(2015)
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Anton Bitel
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Over this long dark night of the soul, our anguished antiheroine - dressed in angel's wings - must decide whether she will keep her baby or give it up.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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November
(2017)
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Anton Bitel
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all at once a slice of 19th-century Estonian ethnography/anthropology, a bizarre, funny, surprisingly bawdy folk horror, and a beautifully stylised (if often messy and muddy) monochrome study in expressionism.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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To Kill a Mockingbird
(1962)
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Anton Bitel
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After the film's pivotal court case is over, a coda takes place on one long October night, in which all the film's themes of crime, prejudice and scapegoating come together in a moment of autumnal horror.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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The Blair Witch Project
(1999)
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Anton Bitel
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here the endless trees, bare and featureless, become ever more disorienting - and nothing quite captures the group's sheer desperation like the sight of a despondent Mike chewing on a fallen, dry leaf.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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Children of the Corn
(1984)
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Anton Bitel
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This corn-fed, sometimes corny study of outlandish religious zealotry taps into urban anxieties about the Bible Belt, before restoring adult order after a Halloween of kiddy chaos.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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Monster House
(2006)
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Anton Bitel
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here the setting is unambiguously autumnal, in what is possibly cinema's first (and only) opening 'single-take' sequence focalised entirely through a deciduous leaf.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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Trick 'r Treat
(2007)
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Anton Bitel
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What unifies all these episodes, beyond their jagged singularity of time and place, is a nostalgic EC Comics-style brand of twisted morality that sees characters punished for infringing the rules of this night when the supernatural runs riot.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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Ghostwatch
(1992)
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Anton Bitel
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The fact that Ghostwatch was also first broadcast on Halloween in 1992 only added to its reality effect, as this telemovie alarmed viewers with the possibility that the very act of watching was putting them at risk in their own homes.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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Halloween
(1978)
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Anton Bitel
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After 15 years under this doctor's supervision, it's unsurprising that Myers' boyhood psychopathy has ripened.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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Symptoms
(1974)
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Anton Bitel
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Like Helen's former friend Cory, Larraz's film disappeared only to resurface, when its original negative - long believed lost - was recently rediscovered and restored.
Posted Oct 21, 2021
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Aniara
(2018)
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Anton Bitel
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Placing the human condition in a floating petri dish, this ode to entropy, emptiness and oblivion is, in keeping with its source, richly abstract and poetic.
Posted Oct 16, 2021
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The Congress
(2013)
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Anton Bitel
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a melancholic, meta-cinematic satire, set in an online world both within and beyond Lem's imagination.
Posted Oct 16, 2021
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A Scanner Darkly
(2006)
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Anton Bitel
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rotoscoping [is] the perfect visual analogue for all the disorientation and dissociation of Dick's novel, whose brain-altered burnouts have become alienated from the world around them and their own sense of self.
Posted Oct 16, 2021
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War of the Worlds
(2005)
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Anton Bitel
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its human hero strap[s] explosive devices to his body in a campaign of guerrilla warfare and suicide bombing against an overwhelming force - all tactics of, precisely, the othered terror on which America had recently declared war.
Posted Oct 16, 2021
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Starship Troopers
(1997)
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Anton Bitel
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Here the bestial brutality of US imperialism is shown from the inside.
Posted Oct 16, 2021
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Horror Express
(1972)
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Anton Bitel
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loco motion picture
Posted Oct 16, 2021
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Forbidden Planet
(1956)
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Anton Bitel
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"Aladdin's lamp in a physics laboratory!"
Posted Oct 16, 2021
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